Review: 'To the End of June' by Cris Beam

August 16, 2013|By Robin Erb

Girl in a doorway (Image by J. Parsons, Getty ImagesFlickr RM)

In news reports of child abuse and foster care gone wrong, it is convenient — perhaps even a matter of mental self-preservation — to categorize the players into good and bad, evildoers and those who will deal with them. The latest unimaginable inhumanity to a child, we tell ourselves, is a problem now absorbed into some system somewhere else.

In “To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care,” Cris Beam rejects such self-righteous simplicity, instead introducing readers to a few of the thousands of cases that churn through the system every year — addicts and teens whose children have been yanked from them (arguably for good reason, but maybe not), foster parents who have gained and given up children (again for good reason, but maybe not), toddlers and teens who have been whipsawed from one heartbreak to another.

There are the children who fight the love that is handed to them, resolved not to be thrown away again, and would-be parents who find that it's far more difficult to build dreams and families than adoption pamphlets would suggest. And of course, there are advocates and bureaucrats in the infinitely infuriating and famously overwhelmed U.S. foster care system that Beam describes as the "fascinating, if sad, culmination of three separate lines of social policy — toward poverty, racial difference, and child abuse — finally braiding together in the middle and end of the twentieth century."

On this shaky foundation, society bases its notions of the acceptable family and that which is unacceptable and must be dismantled. By last count, there were more than 400,540 children in foster care. Two centuries deep into these government systems, those deemed unfit are disproportionately the poor, black and Hispanic. Yet "To the End of June" doesn't read like a book of compiled history lessons; neither does it contain rants of blame or claims to a cure. Rather, Beam invites the reader inside the system for sometimes uncomfortably close but always compassionate visits with parents, children and workers.

It begins with a stopover in Beam's own past, in a San Francisco middle-class apartment in the 1980s. She was 8 when her father walked out, she writes. Her mother began selling her body while Beam counted cans in the cupboard and rationed food. Men "with their work books and their mustaches and their awful sweat smell" staggered into their San Francisco apartment, where Beam and her 2-year-old brother lived with their mother. Her mother gave her a deadbolt for her bedroom door.

"I remember being afraid," she writes.

She was molested. She was on her own at 14. But Beam doesn't dwell on this past, treating it almost as though it's in the interest of full disclosure. Rather, she moves the reader on to other stories. Still, the brief stop in her past is wrenching enough:

When I lived with my mother, her kind of crazy was the only life I knew. I didn't know it was bad until I left, but once I did, I could no longer survive with that memory intact. I had to cauterize off entire interior landscapes, to become somebody new. I had to accept a new mother, with new mother clothes, new mother breath, new mother words — words that told me my old mother, my real mother, was unfit, my life before was unfit, I too was unfit. But it was when I left my mother's unfit home that I no longer could fit anywhere at all.

These words echo throughout the book as we meet other teens who — despite what we are told is terrible neglect (and sometimes abuse) at the hands of their parents — long to return to them.

"I always knew somehow that we could lose my mother, and despite all the pain, I didn't want to. Above all, I didn't want it to be my fault," Beam writes.

These stories underscore the impossibility of defining child welfare's simple mandate — to do what's best for a child — and to carry it out. What counts more in this calculus, bloodlines or bonding? Beam asks. Families with money? Education and opportunity? Families with love but nothing else?

"Every night in every city, children are buckled into vans or police cars (like criminals), as wards of the state (like criminals), and driven to a stranger's house and told to behave. Children explain this to themselves in a myriad of ways: often, because they're children, it's because of something they did. ('I wet the bed, I was stealing at school.') Often, the reality is bureaucratic. … And almost always, the kids get no real explanation."